This is a guest post by Elena Larina, a jewellery artist working in the tatting technique. You can find her other guest posts here and here.

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Hello all! I am Elena. Today I would like to show you the intricacies of the process of making tatted jewelry. I took many pictures and wrote a detailed description of my work while I was making my latest tatted necklace. Welcome to my workshop!

I started with making beaded settings for the big tiger eye cabochons. I glued the stones on a piece of felt, then sewed the Toho beads on it all around the cabs and set the stones. Then I glued the whole setting on a piece of leather and stitched the two edges (felt and leather) together with the beads.

The photograph shows the finished pendant with the cabs sewed together:

Then I sketched a scheme of my lace before I started weaving it:

Then I needed to prepare a shuttle with the threading. I use a double thread, so I've wound it on the shuttle from two coils of the threading at the same time. I also made a beading needle from a piece of wire and threaded the seed beads that I needed for the weaving on it.

I let one of the beads down the thread when I needed to weave it into my lace. If other beads slid down, they were returned back to the shuttle.

I left a long thread end for sewing the bigger (tiger eye) beads to the lace when the work would be completed.

Here is my scheme for the lower lace for the pendant:

All the thread ends were carefully hidden when the lace was completed. I left only one of them, so I could sew the bigger beads later.

I only had one more element to weave. That was the chain:

All the weaving has been done, but the necklace was still far from being finished. The next step was to sew the tiger eye beads onto the lace, then attach the lace elements to the cabs.

I needed to hide the thread ends when the work has been completed and all the tiger eye beads have been sewn onto the lace.

The bottom lace element was sewed to the cab while I was attaching the tiger eye beads to it. I sewed it twice to make the connection stronger.

I flipped my pendant to the back side and sewed the lace and the cab's setting together one more time.

The next step was to sew the two top lace elements to the pendant. I made sure that everything was aligned well. Sometimes I use a double-sided tape so the elements do not shift while being sewed together. All the tape glue needs to be removed afterwards, of course.

The lace needed to be sewed on both sides (the front and the back side):

Absolutely nothing is left by now... just attaching the chain to the pendant...